Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor

by Yossi Klein Halevi

Arabs are discriminated against; even more surprising, a majority say they are proud to be Israeli. Asked whether they would opt for citizenship in a future Palestinian state, the overwhelming majority say no, even if they could remain in their homes and not move across the border.

Nakba.

To remember

Israel’s Jews are a curious majority: We are a majority in our own country but are acutely aware of being a minority in a hostile region—a region to which Arab Israelis belong, by culture and sentiment. That means that both the Jews and the Arabs of Israel often feel at once like a majority and a minority.

The gap between the polls that show an appreciation of Israel among Arab citizens with the expressions of alienation and even hatred by Knesset members representing them is untenable.

“The rebirth of Israel didn’t occur because of the Holocaust. The Holocaust occurred because there was no Israel.”

Vashem. Israel’s president, Reuven Rivlin,

Most of all, they spoke of their love for and gratitude to Israel, which allowed them to heal. For me, as the son of a survivor, what is ultimately most significant about the Holocaust is that we survived it, not as victims but as victors. We are a people long practiced in endurance. We have outlived the empires that tried to destroy us—going back to ancient Egypt and Babylon and Rome.

My neighbor, Aliza, came here as a girl from Kurdistan, just before the creation of the state; her mother, a widow, decided to raise the children in Jerusalem, where they arrived after weeks of travel by donkey through Iraq and Syria and Lebanon, hungry and ragged but home. Or my friend Shula, who was twelve years old when her family began walking from their Ethiopian village toward Zion, and who for weeks carried her little brother on her back. Or my friend Alex, who sat in the Gulag for organizing classes in Hebrew, an illegal language in the Soviet Union. As a former American Jew, I am among the most privileged of Israelis, scarred mostly by inherited memories. I came to Israel to be among those who refused to be defeated by history.

Not that we don’t pay a high price for living under extremity. The Israeli character can be edgy, aggressive; my wife, Sarah, who grew up in genteel Connecticut, calls Israel the post-traumatic stress capital of the world. We cut each other off on the road and in lines. Our politics can be brutal, each side denouncing the other as enemies of Israel. There is growing violence in our schools. Political corruption is on the rise. We live with accumulated layers of unresolved trauma—wave after wave of immigrants entering a country facing the constant threat of terrorism and missile attacks and, every few years, outright war.

Israel isn’t just accused of committing crimes; it is a crime.

There is good reason for me to be in survival mode. When I look around my borders I see Hezbollah in the north, Hamas in the south, Islamic Revolutionary Guards from Iran on the Golan Heights—all passionately committed to my destruction. Iranian leaders promise that Israel will cease to exist in a matter of decades; on Iranian missiles is painted the slogan DEATH TO ISRAEL. Iran’s protégé, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, sarcastically invited Jews around the world to move to Israel because it will be easier to kill them all once they are concentrated in one place.

One lesson Jews learned from the Holocaust is this: When your enemy says he intends to destroy you, believe him.

Israelis. The initiative came from the Arab side: a Melkite priest from Nazareth, Abuna Emile Shoufani, together with a group of leading Muslim and Christian figures from the Palestinian Israeli community, who were seeking some way to break the growing estrangement between Arabs and Jews within Israel.

On the bus to the site an Arab woman took the mike: “I’ve come,” she said, “because I fear the anger that is distorting me.” Maybe that’s why I came, too: not to save the Middle East but myself. The

this way: It never happened, we’re glad it did, and we’re going to do it again.

“tempted” claim presumably refers to the pre-67 bombastic rhetoric of Syria and Egypt and implies knowledge of the Arab states’ state of mind; yet all scholarly research which analyzed the Arab leadership in 1967 concluded with certainty that none of the Arab states intended to attack.

And the withdrawal itself was only partial; indirect control remained—the world still considers Gaza to be occupied due to Israeli control of its airspace, maritime waters, land borders, electricity, communications networks, population register,

What I have always heard is the word “alhaykal almaz’aom,” which means the claimed temple, referring to the temple that the Jews claim to have had in Jerusalem. It